Saxonville Case Analysis

Saxonville was a company that produced a variety of pork sausage products, especially fresh sausage. Their key brand products were bratwurst, breakfast sausage, and an Italian sausage named Vivio. While the bratwurst and breakfast categories showed no growth or decline, Italian sausage was the one category showing growth among producers. Saxonville’s Vivio brand also shared the market growth. However, Vivio was available only in 16% of the large supermarkets of the nation. The product name was determined in Italian as there was a worry of discordance of Italian product and ‘German heritage’ company. The price was about the same as other regional Italian sausages. Even though there was not so much of distinctive identity or positioning of Vivio, the product was good enough to attract the traders to introduce Saxonville’s other products. Vice president of marketing Steve Sears in Saxonville is now searching for a possibility of “the Italian opportunity” for its company to develop Vivio as a national product.

    Saxonville Sausage Company used two research methods which are qualitative and quantitative. We can find out why the company used both methods by looking at the reasons why Sears hired Ann Banks. Banks had an experience in brand identity and development work. She not only just depends on developing a distinctive product but also knows how to match up core values in the ‘hearts and minds’ of consumers with the attributes of a product. She was the one that can make consumers feel that the product was specially made for them. Saxonville needed a positioning plan. First of all, she needed to find out the core values of consumers. To achieve this, she had to use qualitative methods. Based on the findings from qualitative research, she needed to make use of quantitative methods to back up the results with concrete numbers.

    Initially, qualitative research was conducted with target consumers to understand their behaviors and needs. The next stage, they... [continues]

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